The monsoon had arrived in the Western Peaks. The relentless, rhythmic drumming of rain against the ancient granite was the only thing that could pierce the heavy veil of Zarina’s sleep. She drifted awake, her eyes heavy and burning. She had managed less than four hours of rest—a brutal standard she had maintained for more days than she could count, her body a machine running on fumes and habit.

  As she sat up, the cold air of the room bit at her skin. She reached for her pillow and felt the dampness; it was a salt-stained testament to the silent, racking tears of the night before. In the darkness of the mountain peaks, where she was supposed to be a pillar of strength for the dying, she was hollow. Her room was a graveyard of abandoned ambition and a cluttered mess of medical journals, discarded clothes, and empty tea cups—the external manifestation of a mind that had stopped caring about the order of things.

  She moved like a ghost toward the bathroom. Her limbs felt like leaden weights, and there was a permanent frost in her marrow that no thermal heater seemed able to reach. She turned the brass handles of the tub, and steam rose in lazy, silver curls, enveloping her naked body like a shroud. She sank deep into the scalding water, the heat a sharp contrast to the biting chill of the room. The surface lapped at the peaks of her breasts, but the warmth remained superficial. It reddened her skin, but it never reached the ice frozen deep within her chest.

  Silent tears began to fall again, mixing unnoticed with the bathwater. Her mind was a broken record, replaying the emptiness that had hollowed her out. Absently, her hand trailed down the curve of her stomach, her long, dark Orosian nails—nearly two inches of glossy, obsidian-like lethality—brushed against the soft mound between her thighs. There was no spark of desire, no flicker of heat. It was merely a numb, clinical search for proof that she was still a biological entity, a living creature capable of sensation. The depression clung to her like damp skin, heavy and unrelenting, dragging her under even as the water cooled around her untouched form.

  After pulling herself from the tub, Zarina dressed in the practical, dark silks of a field surgeon. She reached for the small plastic bottle on her desk. A single antidepressant slid down her throat with a bitter swallow of lukewarm water. It was quickly followed by the sharp, acrid smoke of a cigarette—the twin pillars of her survival.

  She stood before the tall, silver-backed mirror, a flawless white canvas glowing softly in the dim, morning light. Despite the rot she felt inside, the woman in the mirror was a masterpiece of Orosian biology. Her blue eyes, vivid and startling as a midsummer sky, stared back with a quiet, haunted intensity. They were framed by thick waves of golden blonde hair that cascaded over her shoulders like a frozen waterfall.

  Her body was built for a life she felt she was no longer living. Her breasts were full and voluminous, yet held a firm, youthful gravity, rising and falling with each shallow, nicotine-tinted breath. A slim, athletic waist tapered elegantly into wide hips that supported a round, uplifted butt—pert and inviting, a silhouette that would have turned heads in any capital of the Kabir Empires. Her black nails, sharp and glossy, traced idle, subconscious patterns along her curves. The contrast of the dark, predatory points against her pale, porcelain skin accentuated the smooth, lithe lines of her form, a predator’s beauty trapped in a victim’s mind.

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  Zarina was a true daughter of the peaks. She remembered her mother’s hands, rough but gentle, stitching together her first set of wings made from cured liera-skin when she was barely a child. But the sky had turned gray for her far too early. She had lost her mother at eleven, a tragedy that planted the seed of a desperate need to save others. She had sacrificed everything—her youth, her hobbies, the prospect of a family—to become a doctor.

  In her final year of medical school, her father had passed away, leaving her an orphan of the mountains. After three years of grueling practice on the highly advance planet Arox, the siren song of the war had called her back to Oros. Now, she was caught in a vicious cycle of trauma. Her younger sister was married, a mother herself, living a life of warmth and connection. Zarina, however, was swallowed by a loneliness so profound it felt like a physical weight on her lungs.

  She often found herself replaying "what if" scenarios of the boys she had rejected in her youth—the ones who had looked at her with adoration she was too busy to return. She wondered if they would have provided the protection and the kindness she so desperately craved now. She had so much compassion to give, a reservoir of love that was currently stagnating. Her only partners left were her pills and the embers of her cigarettes.

  Every inch of her body screamed at her to crawl back into the damp sheets and disappear, but Zarina ignored the leaden weight of her limbs. Discipline was the only thing she had left. She strapped the rain-slicked wings of leather and Oros-metal to her waist and arms, the harness clicking into place with a cold finality.

  She walked to the edge of the balcony, overlooking an endless, misty pit of a canyon. The wind howled, carrying the scent of wet pine and distant artillery. She closed her eyes, leaned forward into the void, and let gravity take her.

  As she plummeted, she snapped her wings open. The liera-skin caught the updrafts, and she soared through the monsoon. The rain lashed against her face, and the wind whipped her golden hair into a frenzy as she navigated the treacherous, jagged peaks to reach the resistance medical camp. In the air, for a few brief moments, she felt a ghost of the freedom she used to know.

  The camp was a symphony of agony. As she landed on the muddy platform and retracted her wings, the stench of iron and infection hit her like a wall. The corridors of the mountain-carved infirmary were filled with the screams of men undergoing surgery without enough anesthetic.

  A nurse, her face splattered with blood, intercepted her. "Dr. Zarina, thank God. A patient just arrived from the lower Western passes. High-altitude sickness, stage three. He’s non-Orosian. Please, he’s in Cabin 4. Check him immediately."

  "I'm going," Zarina replied, her voice a flat, dead monotone that hid the exhaustion threatening to buckle her knees.

  She pushed open the heavy wooden door of the cabin. The dim, flickering fluorescent light overhead cast long, skeletal shadows across the small room. On the narrow cot lay the newest patient, unconscious and pale.

  The medics had already unbuttoned his salt-stained shirt to allow for easier breathing. The fabric was splayed open, revealing a chiseled, powerful torso. His six-pack was defined and hard, rippling subtly with each shallow, labored breath he took. His long, dark hair, matted with mud and rain, fanned out across the white pillow like spilled ink, framing a rugged beard that accentuated the sharp, masculine line of his jaw.

  Zarina paused, her hand frozen on the medical chart.

  Her gaze drifted, unbidden, down the hard lines of his abdomen to the defined 'V' of his hips as they disappeared into the waistband of his dark trousers. A sudden, violent rush of heat flooded her core—a spark of forbidden, visceral desire so sharp it made her pulse quicken for the first time in years.

  She stood there, paralyzed, imagining what it would feel like to trace those hard, muscular lines with her own dark nails. Her heart began to hammer against her ribs, a frantic rhythm that drowned out the rain outside. This man didn't look like the broken, dying soldiers she treated daily. Even in his unconscious state, he looked like a god of fire and stone dropped into her world of ice.

  For a fleeting, terrifying second, the depression that had anchored her soul felt light. The ice in her chest began to crack under the heat of his presence. She forced her eyes back to the chart, her fingers trembling as she reached out to check his pulse, her touch lingering just a second too long on the warmth of his throat.

  In her gray, monochrome world, the stranger was a flash of color she wasn't sure she was ready to see.